Pissed Off…

Basically, I just got home from youth group, so kinda a sudden blog… but basically Danny’s simulation pissed me off. period end of story.

For those of you not there tonight, Danny played a new member of the youth group who was sort of a pessimist. He came into the youth group talking about how the church has worked for so many years… theres no reason to change the way we worship… and it made me angry… not at Danny, but at the people who in reality think the way Danny did in the simulation…

I AM NOT, NOR HAVE I EVER BEEN, NOR DO I EVER WANT TO BEA TYPICAL CHURCH GOING PERSON.

Let me explain. From my experience, many people who go to church at some point or another lose their faith in a way that they just “go through the motions” in church, and the actions no longer have meaning.

In my mind, there is a difference between having faith and being religious. To me, being religious is going to church, and being active in a church, all that strictly church stuff.

I DO NOT think thats important.

Having faith is much more important. To me, this is knowing what is right and what is wrong, and putting your thoughts and actions forward with optimism that you can make things better. Having faith is showing people that they alone have the power to change the world, to mold and create their perfect world, and truly believing this.

Many churches I’ve been to, not going to name them, have caused me to either lose faith, or become so bored that I get nothing out of it. Church should be a way of practicing your FAITH… which it is not.

No one can tell you the right or wrong way to practice your faith, it is something that is specific to each person. Personally, I help others, I listen to others, and I try to keep a smile on my face while doing it. No one can tell me this is wrong. The St. Stephens Youth Group is a community I have found which allows me to do this.

I DONT NEED CHURCH TO PRACTICE MY FAITH!

People change with the times, and the church has not. Let people worship the way they feel most appropriate… Let them focus on what they think is important in a service. Tradition is not the important part…

sorry to break it to you but HISTORY HAS BEEN WRONG MADE MISTAKES…. WE NEED TO LEARN FROM THEM…

The past is the reason for so many horrible things, such as overreaction causing conflict, misunderstanding, whatever you can think of. So improve on the past, don’t live with it… the past doesn’t have to be our present. I dont think current church services fit our generation… So lets change it, make it fit us, examples, more music, more discussions, whatever it is your thinking of while reading this… your right.

God I wish you could have said this on film. This is good stuff. One thing I might say that tradition is not all bad. There are certain things that people are proud to have fortified for history but I agree that there are definitely ideas and practices that can be reinterpreted and reworked. you know…create our own religious practice and create our own ways to express faith that are more appropriate to our times and perhaps more open to everyone. It’s true there is a lot of order and structure that bear down on people and a lot of times can make people threatened or even simply uninterested. But I just wanted to say that there is some importance in tradition and Lori, you probably didn’t mean it’s not important at all but that people make TOO big a deal about it. And that’s true too because there are people who have fought violently and died horrible deaths over tradition. But there are some traditions or some parts of traditions that we can appreciate but we should also be more open to new ideas and practices and most importantly open to people who think differently. Man I wish you could have given me some of that anger on film though. That’s some juicy stuff. Thanks Lori. Don’t let people like that anger you. Try to convince them that we should live in a world in which we verbalize and discuss our issues so that we become more open to ideas, opinions and each other.

That’s a pretty bold thing to say, but we have created traditions for ourselves in the youth group. We’ve made going on mission trips four three years now as a tradition in which we express our care for people outside of our own realities. We do circle time that is even like a ritual. In essence our youth group meetings are derived from the conventional worship services but we’ve reinterpreted the meaning and the importance of why we gather together and connect to one another on so many levels, emotional, perhaps spiritual, etc. We were opened to the idea that we don’t need to talk about God and read bible stories to feel an essence of relationship, love, and growth. We have interpreted that by our actions of love and actions of building connections we do mission work. We come to youth group so we can acknoweldge each other as important people in our lives. We hang out as friends ritually like we do on every Sunday night because we don’t always have the time to all hang out at once. It’s just like in religions people go to church or mosques or synagogues to aknowledge the importance of God to them. And what we hope to do as a Youth Group is to keep what we do going for a long time. Things will always change and you are right they should. Let’s hope that we are more open to them than the conventional organized church. And also out of respect for those who truly believe that tradition and ritual are important, there are a lot of people who believe that church worship is what drives their understanding of their purpose just like we reaffirm our purpose whenever we care about each other and whenever we make a difference. It’s just people’s way of expressing their faith but you are right that people should be more open to other expressions. We often don’t get enough respect as a youth group.

I think there are also some traditions in conventional church that I find important. As a christian, I think that having readings from the bible during the service is important, and I like to hear sermon’s interpreting what the readings say. Although I think that many traditions in the church are stale, some of them have meaning for me such as The Lords Prayer and The Nicene Creed. Most important, I think is communion, although I’m not fond of how it’s done at St. Stephens. Sorry to get so religious. I totally understand where you’re coming from lori, a lot of people just go through the motions when they’re at church, and don’t really think about what’s important to them. It was a really insightful blog, even though i wasn’t there for danny’s simulation.